


Offsite Assignment

by Snickfic



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Adoption, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Het Mpreg, Mpreg, Plot, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pregnant Sex, Romance, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-01-20 17:14:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18529540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: After the dissolution of SHIELD, Sharon doesn't expect to ever talk to Steve Rogers again. She definitely doesn't expect the Avengers to borrow her from the CIA on special assignment: as Steve's bodyguard in the last weeks of his werewolf pregnancy, hidden away in a farmhouse in upstate New York. Yet here she is.





	Offsite Assignment

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lucifuge5](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lucifuge5/gifts).



> Dear recip, this fic was written with your "plotty mpreg" and "taking care of pregnant partner" requests in mind, but most of all I wrote you a story with werewolves, because I saw "WEREWOLVES!!" in your likes and knew I had to. I so hope you enjoy the result. <3
> 
> Huge thanks to lionessvalenti, whose cheerleading and canon knowledge were invaluable throughout the writing of this, and who also provided the title. I'm not sure you knew what you were getting into when you agreed to cheerlead, but I appreciated it so much! Thanks also to sevenfists, who is not even in this fandom and did so much hand-holding anyway. Bless you both. <3

Natasha Romanov picked Sharon up in front of the airport driving a sleek dick-equivalent of a sports car. “Thanks for coming,” Romanov said, laying her foot on the gas and pulling away from the curb. 

“Sure,” Sharon said, instead of pointing out that her boss hadn’t given her a choice; _we’re lending you out_ , he’d said, and given her ten minutes to pack everything up she might want for the next several weeks on assignment. _What assignment?_ she’d wanted to know, and he’d shrugged. 

Rookies with the CIA didn’t get _lent out_. They definitely didn’t get sent to upstate New York on a private Stark jet or get chauffeur service from the Black Widow. Yet here Sharon was, riding shotgun while Romanov wove between lanes like traffic laws were for other people. Sharon’s duffel sat at her feet, packed with all the essentials in case of emergency, even though—again—rookies didn’t get called out on those kinds of emergencies. Old habits died hard. “So, what’s the job?” Sharon asked.

Romanov shot her a glance. “We need a babysitter. Not literally,” she added, before Sharon had time to react. “Probably. The Avengers have to go put out a fire—probably literally—and we need someone to keep an eye on Rogers. I’m the last one in town. The quinjet’s picking me up.”

“Rogers,” Sharon repeated.

“Yeah, he’s not going. He’s indisposed.” Romanov seemed to find this amusing for some reason. “You know he’s a werewolf, right?” She said it casually, like that story wouldn’t make the career of any journalist who broke it: the famed serum involved werewolf blood, and that made Steve Rogers a lup. 

“Yeah,” Sharon said. Yeah, Sharon knew. When you were the security detail for a guy who didn’t know he _had_ a security detail, SHIELD let you in on those little personal tidbits. Or it had, when there was a SHIELD.

“No surprises, then,” Romanov said. She hit a button on the steering wheel, and suddenly Sharon was cocooned on all sides by the sound of—Dolly Parton? “It’s American,” Romanov yelled.

Natasha Romanov was fucking with her. Sharon supposed she ought to feel honored. There was no chance of conversation now, so she spent the next half hour watching farmland roll past, bright green with spring growth, and thinking about werewolves and Aunt Donna and SHIELD. 

At last Romanov pulled off the two-lane highway and down a gravel track. The road wound through a field and, at last, towards a farmhouse: two stories, an attic on top, a porch across the front. The house was painted a fading sky blue. Dolly Parton had segued to Lady Gaga a few miles back, but she fell abruptly silent now. Sharon climbed out, hefted her duffel, and followed Romanov inside. “This is Rogers’s call,” Romanov said. “If he decides he doesn’t want you, you’re out. It’s not personal.”

“Wait. You haven’t told him I’m coming?”

“We told him someone was coming,” Romanov said, and pushed the door open. There was nothing for Sharon to do but follow Romanov into the kitchen, which was full of old-fashioned sensibilities and gleaming new appliances. Steve was at the sink, his back to them; Sharon would recognize those shoulders anywhere. And then he turned, and Sharon didn’t recognize anything at all, because Steve’s belly was round and heavy, swelling out over the waistline of his track pants and stretching his t-shirt to its limits.

Her first, bewildered thought was that he’d put on a hell of a lot of weight, and when had that happened? Her second was that he was ill. But it wasn’t either of those things, not precisely. Steve Rogers was pregnant. Heavily pregnant, probably due any time. That meant he wasn’t just a werewolf, but cross-sex, too, with a female wolf form. That detail definitely hadn’t been in her briefing.

“Congratulations?” Sharon offered.

He huffed. “Thanks. Really, Nat?”

Romanov shrugged, unconcerned. “Agent Thirteen had a spotless record at SHIELD.” Sharon didn’t point out that that record was perhaps slightly incomplete, due to sudden and catastrophic dissolution of the agency. “She has medical field training—”

“I thought you said she wasn’t a nurse.”

“ _You_ said she wasn’t a nurse. She has lups in the family, you already know her, and she was Hill’s top recommendation. And I like her.”

Sharon refrained from reacting to any of this. Steve listened noncommittally, his eyes on Sharon. “So do your friends call you Agent or Thirteen?”

“Uh, Sharon, sorry.” Sharon held a hand out to shake, and he took it. She took a deep breath and said, “Carter, actually. Sharon Carter.”

His eyebrows climbed, but he only squeezed her hand politely and let go. He eyed her duffel. “You sure you want this job? It’s gonna be pretty boring.”

“Steve—” Romanov began.

Sharon said, “Well, for one, nobody asked me. My boss packed me up and booted me onto a plane. But for two I—don’t really know what the job is? Agent Romanov said babysitting?” She couldn’t help but slant another glance at Steve’s pregnant belly.

Steve rolled his eyes. “I’m not due for a couple of weeks. Nat just thinks she’s funny.” Romanov pressed her lips together, admitting nothing. “No, it’s just that I’ll be out here by myself while the rest of the team is out on the mission, and they think I need someone to keep an eye on me.”

“Why not just stay at Stark’s tower?”

“That’s the part he doesn’t want to tell you,” Romanov said. “His wolfy side has gotten twitchy. He wanders off. One time we found him in _Queens_ ,” she said in a scandalized stage whisper. Steve grimaced and crossed his arms over his stomach. It was a little disorienting to look at, under the circumstances. “He likes it better out here, close to nature. He also doesn’t like people much.” She patted Steve’s arm.

Steve heaved a sigh in Romanov’s direction and said to Sharon, “It should be only a few days. It’ll be really boring,” he added, as if the threat of peace and quiet would persuade Sharon to turn around and return to her rookie drudge work at Langley.

Sharon hefted her bag a little higher on her shoulder. “I can keep myself occupied.”

Steve looked her in the eye, expressionless, giving away nothing. “Nat—”

“Either she stays or I stay, which would short the team two people instead of one.”

“That’s blackmail.”

“Mm,” Romanov said. She didn’t look like she was kidding around.

Steve sighed. To Sharon, he said, “Look, this is awkward, and I’m really sorry, but I have to ask a favor.”

“Sure?”

“I need to smell you.” He grimaced as he said it. 

“Oh, yeah. Of course.” This, at least, she had some experience with. She’d met a few of Aunt Donna’s friends and relations in her time. Sharon set her duffel on the kitchen floor and rose, letting her gaze drift to the kitchen window. It looked over a field, spotted with late-blooming wildflowers. Sharon kept her breath easy as Steve huffed and closed the distance between them. He put a hand to her shoulder, casual, informative: _I’m close._ He put his nose to her hair and inhaled.

Sharon counted the seconds. At thirty-two, Steve backed off. “Yeah, okay. I can—okay.”

“Good. We’ll be in touch. The car’s in the barn if you need it, gassed and ready to go. Keys are in the kitchen drawer under the coffee maker. Carter, if anything happens, if you need _anything_ , just pick up the phone. Jarvis will send an army out to you guys, a doctor—anything.” Romanov squeezed Steve’s arm, gave Sharon a nod, and walked right out of the house.

Sharon looked at Steve. “Right,” he said. “Uh, we have a couple of guest rooms?” 

She followed him out into the spacious living room and down the hall. Even from behind she could see the difference in his gait, now that she was looking for it—not a waddle, but a stride that carried a measure of caution with it. He pushed open a door into a room decorated in tired country chic. The bed skirt had ruffles on it. “Jarvis can get you hooked up with the secure wi-fi. Uh, you probably want to scope the place out? Let me know if you have questions, or Jarvis can answer those, too, I guess.”

“Awesome.” Steve still looked a little disconcerted by her presence. Sharon wondered if it was the wolf or the man that was uneasy. She flashed him a smile. “So, neighbors?”

Steve gave a startled laugh. It felt like a victory. “Neighbors,” he agreed.

* * *

Sharon started with the bedroom. She found the first camera within minutes, clipped to the base of the ceiling fan. It didn’t even seem to be hidden. She considered it for a moment, wondering if she wanted to disable it, when—

“I’d rather you didn’t,” said a voice. It was male. There was no one in the room with Sharon. 

“What the hell,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” said the voice. “We haven’t been introduced. My name is Jarvis. I’m Mr. Stark’s butler and a top-of-the-line artificial intelligence protocol.”

“Uh, hi? Sharon Carter.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance. I use the cameras to help protect the household, so I would be obliged if you would leave them where you find them. You won’t find all of them, in any case.”

Sharon let that sit for a moment. “Sure,” she said. “Okay. You mind if I look the place over, though?”

Jarvis allowed that that would be acceptable. So this was what she’d missed out on, opting for the civil service over that position Hill had offered her with Stark Enterprises. Then again, Sharon was here anyway. Maybe the choice of public versus private hadn’t made that much difference in the end.

The house was spacious, with enough beds and couches to sleep the Avengers and a couple of guests, but it wasn’t a mansion. It was what it had looked like from the outside: a well-appointed farmhouse. It had two attic bedrooms and attic windows looking out on all four corners of the yard. The windows had shutters, too, and when Sharon checked one, she found that the back was steel-plated.

She circled the outside of the house, noticing the ordinary locks on the shed and the small barn, the fresh-cut grass, the small but well-weeded garden. Some of the lettuce was ready for picking, and green tomatoes the size of cherries hung from fragrant branches. The lawn extended a hundred feet from the house in all directions. No one would sneak up on the house, especially not with Jarvis’s cameras keeping a lookout. To the east there were fields growing something leafy and green. Woods sprawled to the west.

It was a good set-up. Sharon cautiously approved of the security measures. This mild-mannered farmhouse had no doubt received the full Tony Stark treatment.

The sun was sinking towards those woods when she climbed the steps back up to the house. As soon as she opened the door, she was entirely swallowed up by the aroma of bacon. She realized she hadn’t eaten since the honey-glazed peanuts a steward had offered her on the plane. 

As expected, she found Steve in the kitchen. “BLTs. You want one?”

“Two,” she said. 

He smirked at the pan. “Two it is.”

The farmhouse had gotten some remodeling at some point, and the kitchen opened into both the living room and the back hall. There was also a door that opened onto the back steps, next to the coal grate. She’d explored earlier. Lots of entrances, lots of exits. Trade-offs. She shifted against the wall just to feel the comforting weight of her handgun at her hip.

Steve gave her another glance. “We’re not actually expecting any trouble.”

“I know. If you were, you’d have brought in a lot more than just me.” 

He shrugged. “You’re a compromise. Tony and Natasha would be happier if I were back at the tower, but I get, I don’t know. Itchy.”

Sharon slid onto a stool by the wall, out of the way, with a clear view of Steve, whom she tried not stare at. Pregnancy was possible for any werewolf whose wolf form was female, as Steve’s must have been, but cross-sex weres were pretty uncommon. Everything else aside, she’d kept a close eye on the man for months. The change was striking—not just in his profile, but in the careful, deliberate way he carried himself.

Sharon shoved all those thoughts away and said, “My Aunt Donna’s a wolf, and she was the same when she was pregnant. We couldn’t go over to visit anymore. She just couldn’t handle people. And then at the end she disappeared and scared my uncle half to death. He found her in the shed a day later, with my cousins.”

“Shit.” Steve scrubbed at his face. Then he straightened, as if resolve were literally stiffening his spine, and said, “So, you’re working with—who, now? I think Nat told me, but.” He shrugged, flashing her a grin full of that boyish charm that had made him the heartthrob of a nation twice, seventy years apart. “Pregnancy brain, you know? It’s no joke.”

Sharon filled a glass of water from the sink, climbed back up on her stool, and told him about starting at the CIA, more or less on the bottom rung—with promise of rapid advancement, but still. It was frustrating. “And there’s nobody there like Fury.”

Steve laughed softly. “There’s nobody anywhere like Fury.”

“It’s the truth.”

He nodded to himself as he prodded at the bacon some more. It must have been done, because he forked it out, piece by piece, and laid it on the beds of lettuce and tomato and toast. Sharon came around and took her plate.

They were very serviceable BLTs, or maybe Sharon had just gone too long since her mid-morning snack at Langley. It had been a lot of hours ago. She sat at the kitchen table, which was square and seated four, so the Avengers must have eaten elsewhere when they were around. She inhaled her sandwich, and across from her, Steve did the same. It was quiet except for the crunch of the lettuce. It was domestic in a way her guard duty down the hall from Steve had never been.

Steve paused his chewing and pushed away from the table. Sharon beat him up. “What can I get you?”

“Just water, thanks.”

Sharon got a mug from the cupboard and filled it at the tap. She slid it across the table to Steve. After he’d taking a long swallow and set the mug down, Sharon said, “So am I allowed to ask?”

Steve paused, resumed chewing, swallowed. He gave her another of those rueful smiles. “There’s a pack I run with sometimes. Or—not a pack, technically, I guess. Just a group of wolves. A friend of mine at the VA hooked me up with them. I spent a full moon with them a few months ago, and—you know what that’s like, right?” He turned faintly pink. 

“So I hear,” Sharon said. The first time she’d been old enough to get tipsy with Aunt Donna, she had heard _stories_. That had been a revelation.

“Yeah, so, I knew my—I knew I was female, as a wolf, but the doctors always told me that I was sterile, because I’m not a natural-born wolf. Not so much, it turns out.”

Sharon wasn’t sure that answered any of the questions she wanted to know. “And the other parent?”

“He’s a good guy. He was on a break with his boyfriend, but now they’re back together for the long haul, it looks like, and they want kids, but they can’t have any themselves, so.” Steve shrugged. His hand fell to the swell of his stomach. He looked a little self-conscious, but also pleased. 

“So you’re not keeping—it? Them?”

“Them. Twins. And no, no way. I don’t really have a place in my life for kids, now, you know?” Steve broke sharply away from Sharon’s gaze and took a large bite of his sandwich, and Sharon let it lie.

Sharon insisted on doing the dishes. “Was that in the job description?” Steve asked, but he made no move to get up.

“I didn’t _get_ a job description,” Sharon said. She turned from the sink to give Steve a smile, in case he thought she was actually peeved.

He didn’t look reassured. “Look, we do really appreciate you being here. I appreciate it. I wasn’t very sure about it at first, but I know it makes the team feel better.”

Sharon returned her attention to the iron skillet, slick with the remaining bacon grease. She vaguely remembered having Netflix plans for the evening; she’d just added _Legally Blonde_ to her list. Maybe there would have been Thai takeout. That was assuming she wouldn’t have just reviewed notes from the day’s research into the Sokovian history of civil unrest in economic crises and then crashed face-first into bed. 

None of her plans had included Steve Rogers. She wondered if maybe that was a common experience: you didn’t plan for Steve, but he happened to you anyway. It sounded about right. “Honestly, this is a lot more interesting than anything I was going to do today.”

“Really? Scrubbing pans in an old farmhouse in rural New York?”

“Spoken like a man who never has to do any paperwork.”

Steve laughed softly. “Fair enough.”

“Anyway, I like getting out. My grandparents lived on a farm. I kind of miss it.”

“Yeah? We should go for a walk.” He was already pushing to his feet. “You can leave those for later.”

Once Sharon was outside, snuggled into her jacket in the cool, late-spring air, it became apparent that she was merely an excuse. Steve just really liked being outside. He kept scenting the air, not very discreetly, in between pointing out all the features of the place she’d already investigated earlier in the day: the winding driveway, the locked shed. “It’s just where we keep the gym equipment,” he told her. “You can use it tomorrow, if you want.” He nodded them on, towards a sparsely populated little orchard. The twisted forms of the trees were a bit eerie in the late-evening light. 

“So the Avengers spend a lot of time up here?” They hadn’t the year before, when Sharon had Steve detail, but she hadn’t been dialed into their movements for a while now. She wasn’t privy to this stuff anymore.

It took Steve a long time to answer. The light had faded too much for Sharon to make out his expression. “You can just tell me it’s classified. It’s fine. I’m just making conversation.”

He huffed softly. “It’s not that. It’s just embarrassing. Tony set this place up for me.”

“For you,” Sharon echoed.

“Nat wasn’t lying about how much I hate the city these days. It’s weird. I grew up there, you know? Brooklyn born and raised. Now I can’t stand to be around more than two or three people at a time, and I have to _like_ them. The team’s been trading off keeping me company up here. I haven’t been on a mission in months.”

That explained some gossip Sharon had heard. “Well, you only have a few more weeks to go, right?”

“That’s the theory.”

It was getting dark enough that Sharon couldn’t have confidently aimed at a threat if one appeared, not without a night scope. She made noises about being tired, mentioning her busy day and unplanned trip, and Steve hastened them back to the house. Guilt: it worked every time. “Do you have everything you need?” he asked.

“I’m all set,” she told him. Her emergency duffel lacked some of the finer amenities, like pajamas, but she could make do.

“Thanks again,” he told her. “For coming, or for being a good sport about it. Whatever. I’m glad you’re here.”

She paused in the hall to take him in, cheeks flushed a bit from the evening chill, hands jammed in the pockets of his hoodie. The hoodie must have been newer than the t-shirt, because it accommodated his belly comfortably. He looked vulnerable, there under the hall light, though Sharon knew that was a half-truth at best. “I, uh,” she began.

He lifted his eyebrows, politely interested.

“I’ve been riding a desk for a year,” Sharon told him. “The last time I was in the field, my boss got shot in the apartment I was supposed to be protecting. I won’t let that happen this time. I won’t let you down.” Steve’s mouth had fallen open. He shifted, clearly gearing himself up for a pep talk. “I’ll see you in the morning,” Sharon said. “Yell if you need anything.” She turned and strode down the hall, feeling Steve’s blue-eyed gaze on her the whole way.

* * *

Sharon woke up to sunlight shining through lace curtains. They made indistinct, mottled patterns on the far wall. “Jarvis,” Sharon said, “is there any word from the Avengers?”

“They have not yet publicly engaged with their opponent, nor appeared on any international news source.”

And if Sharon wanted any more info, she’d have to ask the guy who was actually cleared to know it, presumably. She sat up and brushed her hair out of her face. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome, Ms. Carter. There are toiletries and clean towels set out for you in the bathroom down the hall.”

“Peachy.”

There were indeed travel-sized bottles of shampoo and conditioner in the bathroom, also a big fluffy towel. She didn’t take her time in the shower—if the unexpected happened and somebody decided to stage an attack on the farmhouse, Sharon wanted to at least be dressed for it—but she appreciated the quality of the water pressure while she was standing in it.

The kitchen was empty when she made her way downstairs, but there was coffee on. She tasted it, made a face, and poured the pot out to start over. She was poking in the cupboards when she glanced out the window and saw a large, four-legged shape trotting towards the house. Sharon went out the back steps, cold on her bare feet. “Steve?” The wolf pricked up its ears and swung in her direction. She really hoped it was Steve.

Usually the etiquette of a human meeting a lup for the first time involved an introduction. Well, Sharon was introducing herself. She sank down on the step: small, non-threatening.

Steve Rogers was a big man, but he was a massive wolf. Maybe that was the effects of the serum. If Sharon were standing, he’d come up almost to her hip. His eyes were still blue, if wolf-shaped now, and his coat was a dark charcoal gray with a lighter underbelly. He seemed to be in the process of shedding his winter coat; tufts stuck out oddly in places. Sharon wondered how wolf-Steve felt about getting brushed. 

He slowed as he got close. “Hi,” she said, offering a hand. He could have bitten her arm off without much effort and swallowed it in one bite. Instead he sniffed carefully for a moment. Then he dropped his nose to her feet and sniffed those. “My feet can’t be that interesting. I literally just took a shower.”

He woofed at her. The sound wasn’t all that different from Steve-the-human’s soft, wry laugh. He leaned back into his hindquarters, stretching out on his forelegs and yawning wide enough to show Sharon all his teeth. “Very ferocious,” Sharon said.

Steve snapped his mouth shut, stood up, and then pushed his nose right into her hand. It was wet. “Well, hi there.” Steve woofed and pushed more insistently, and this time Sharon got with the program and let him shove his head under her palm, until she was petting that narrow space between his ears. A little further, and then Sharon discovered the real objective of this exercise: ear scritches. Steve-the-wolf _really_ liked ear scritches. He leaned into her as she dug her fingernails into his fur. She worked all the way around the base of his ears. Then she clawed her hands and worked further back, along his neck and into the thick fur of his hackles. He was definitely shedding.

All at once he woofed again and began nosing insistently past her, up the steps. “Okay, time to go in, I guess,” Sharon said. She got up to let Steve by. His claws clattered on the kitchen floor, but he was gone by the time she got up the steps.

There were eggs in the fridge. She was heating butter in the skillet when Steve reappeared, now upright and wearing clothes. “Good morning,” Sharon said. She couldn’t help grinning.

“Hey.”

There was a funny note in his voice. He wasn’t meeting her eyes. “Everything all right?”

“Sure, sure.” Steve peered over her shoulder. “Are you taking requests?”

“Maybe. I dunno, it wasn’t really in my job description.”

Steve chuckled. Success. “Well, if you are, I’d like four.”

“Four scrambled, coming right up. Cheese?” She’d grated some off the block of artisanal cheddar she’d found in the fridge. Tony Stark in absentia kept a nice kitchen. Or maybe Jarvis did; that seemed likelier.

“Please.”

The next time Sharon glanced over, Steve was messing with his phone. Had he ever had a laptop, she wondered, or had he jumped straight from typewriters and Enigma machines to unlimited data? The year before, she’d only ever seen him with an iPad. “Any word from the Avengers?” she asked.

“Not much yet. Apparently physics gets all screwy near the void. Tony and Bruce are having a great time. Nat says she’s getting a tan.”

The universe was so much weirder than Sharon had thought when she’d first hired on at SHIELD. Aliens, Norse gods, a void. Weird shit. It all felt a few miles above her paygrade. Better to think about security measures to keep Steve safe from some whackjob who decided to break and enter.

Into the silence, Steve said, “I don’t really meet people, as a wolf.”

Sharon turned off the gas flame and began rummaging in the cupboard. “Oh?”

“Yeah, she’s not— _I’m_ not very good at boundaries when I’m a wolf. Sorry.”

“Your wolf is very sweet,” Sharon told him. Maybe a bit more domesticated than the wolves she’d been introduced to in the past, less wary, but she wasn’t going to tell Steve that. She turned and found him staring into the middle distance, the corners of his mouth turned down. “Steve, it’s fine. I’m related to some, remember? I know how it is.”

He snorted. “I don’t, really.” At her raised eyebrow, he said, “I didn’t grow up as a wolf, and the army didn’t give a fuck about the wolf part. They just wanted a better soldier. I didn’t really get a chance to figure out, you know, what it meant. Being a wolf. A lup, you guys say. So I’m just kind of making it up as I go along.”

“That makes sense,” Sharon said carefully.

“Fuck.” He scrubbed his hand over his face. “Sorry. _Therapist_ isn’t in your job description, either.”

Sharon handed him his plate. “Do you _have_ a therapist?”

“Sometimes,” Steve said. He scowled at his eggs, which were exactly the correct consistency, thank you very much. Sharon had stumbled around making them enough mornings in a row, half-awake, to know.

Sharon cleared her throat and asked if Steve talked to Hill much. Privately bankrolled national security felt like a much safer subject. How was Hill liking working for Stark Industries? As they were cleaning up—Steve insisted on dishes this time—Sharon said, “So, speaking of my job description.”

“Yeah?” Steve shot her an easy grin, previous anxieties forgotten.

“Is there anything you want me to, like, _do_ , while I’m here?”

“If the aliens attack, you gotta take point,” he told her.

“That’s less reassuring than I would like,” she said. He grinned wider, which was—distracting. _He looks at everyone like that, Carter. Hold it together._ “Seriously, though, short of aliens…”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s not a lot going on around here. I was going to go check on the garden and then spend some time in the gym. You can work out, too, if you want.”

“Sure, okay. Sounds good.”

Sharon set up shop in the living room with her laptop, working on reports: very dull ones, the kind the agency allowed her to write off the agency’s premises. She had emails from co-workers wanting to know the scoop on her disappearance from work the day before. If she were feeling cheekier, she’d have just told them it was classified, but she didn’t feel that sure of her footing in the office yet. Coming in with five years of SHIELD under her belt meant it had taken a little longer for some people to warm up to her. _Offsite assignment. So fucking boring,_ she told Shavonda. _Save me._

The back door opened and shut, and the kitchen faucet came on. A few minutes later, Steve wandered in, pink from the sun. “I’m opening up the gym. You want in?”

“Yessir,” Sharon said, pushing to her feet. 

From the outside, the shed looked well-kept, freshly painted, lock shiny, but fundamentally it looked like a shed. Then Steve unlocked it and swung the door back, and it didn’t look like a shed at all. Elliptical, two treadmills, punching bag, free weights, and a couple of multi-purpose machines: it was fully outfitted, complete with mirrors on the walls and speakers hung from the ceiling. “Wow,” Sharon said.

“Not bad, right?”

“Passable,” Sharon said, just to make Steve laugh.

Sharon chose a treadmill. She wasn’t going to wear herself out while she was in the field, even if in this case the field involved actual grass and also a garden. She’d brought her running shoes from the house; now she put them on, set the machine, and started off at an easy pace. After a few moments, she bumped up the speed and let herself find a rhythm. She glanced towards the open door every so often, to the spring day, sunshiny between blotches of gray cloud that suggested rain. Later in the afternoon, maybe.

She also glanced the other direction now and then, towards Steve. He was methodically worked his way through the weights. There was a certain thrill in watching him do lat pulls with inhuman amounts of weight while hardly breaking a sweat. His back muscles looked really good doing it, too. This babysitting gig had some perks.

Then she looked and found Steve looking back, expression a little dazed, a forty-pound plate hanging easily from one hand. Sharon knew that glazed look. She wasn’t used to getting it when she was forty minutes into a run, with sweat sticking her hair to her skull. “Good workout?” she called.

Steve came back to himself. “Uh, yeah, yeah. I think I’m done, though. Lock up when you come in?”

“I can do that.” Sharon turned to poke at the display. When Steve was gone, she looked up to the mirror, where she was red-faced and sweaty. It wasn’t remotely her best look, and Steve had definitely been into it. 

She mostly avoided thinking about that day Fury had been shot in Steve’s apartment, but now, just for a moment, she let herself remember the meeting in the hallway just before that, when Steve had asked her out for coffee. He’d been very smooth about it, but not creepy. Sweet. When she’d first taken the assignment, she’d expected to learn that the boyish earnestness she saw in public was just a façade. How could you be that big a hero and look that good and not be a dick?

But as far as Sharon had been able to tell from her months of low-key surveillance, Steve Rogers just really was that nice. Not that it did her any good. She couldn’t have said yes, and then SHIELD was dissolved and what she thought about Steve Rogers as a person didn’t matter anymore. This assignment felt like a do-over in some respects, a second chance, but not like that, she told herself firmly. Steve remained strictly out of bounds. 

The house was quiet when she returned. She showered, scrounged for snacks, and took her station on the couch again. She put a Google alert on “Avengers,” put all of them out her mind, and started searching for information on werewolf births. 

Medical information about werewolves was hard to come by, and a lot of what was available was both stomach-turning and deeply suspect. Sharon supposed Steve already knew about the various eras of dubiously consensual medical experimentation on werewolves, but if he didn’t, she wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up. In the end, though, the basic bodily functions of werewolves were pretty much like those of any canine. Sharon switched gears and looked up veterinarians’ best practices for delivering puppies. She probably wouldn’t mention that to Steve, either.

It was a long time later when she heard Steve’s footsteps on the stairs. An hour and a half, no wonder she felt a little stiff. She put the laptop aside just as he walked in, looking as foggy as she was and with his hair sticking up every which way. It was fucking adorable. “Nap?” Sharon asked, barely trying to hide her amusement.

“Turns out being pregnant takes a lot out of you,” Steve said, easing himself carefully into the recliner across from her. 

“Is it weird?” At Steve’s blank look, Sharon added, “I mean you never thought you could, and now you are?” Belatedly her manners caught up to her. “Sorry, that’s not any of my business.”

“No, it’s fine.” Steve looked down at himself, closing his hand carefully over his stomach. Sharon’s breath caught. She felt like she was intruding on something intimate—something that was indeed none of her business. “It is pretty weird. I dunno. I think if you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have hated the idea of it, but it’s not so bad.”

“Yeah?”

Was this part the pregnancy, too, the way he looked at her so openly, letting her see all his uncertainty? Maybe that was just Steve, once you got to know him. “I told somebody once that I didn’t want to kill anyone, I just didn’t like bullies. And ever since they gave me the treatment, that’s all I’ve been doing. Fighting bullies. Trying to make the world a better place, protecting good people by punching bad people.” He swallowed and dropped his gaze to his belly again. Sharon watched, spellbound. “I feel like this is a way I can make the world a better place, too, without punching anyone to do it. I can give Dave and Ravi a family, like they want. So it’s inconvenient, with having to piss all the fucking time and having to hide out here and being horny as hell—” 

Steve cut himself off abruptly, cheeks flushing. Sharon kept her face carefully blank, in case he should happen to glance her way. 

“—and being, you know, like this,” Steve finished, gesturing to himself. “But I guess I don’t mind it all that much. I’m glad I get to do this. I’m glad I get to meet them when they’re born, even though they won’t be mine.” Steve looked up at last. “I guess that’s weird, too, right? I should feel weirder about all of it.” His mouth twisted.

Sharon cleared her throat, which was suddenly a little choked up. She stood carefully and sat down again on the far end of the couch, next to the recliner and Steve. She wanted to take Steve’s hand, but that seemed inappropriate, so she just leaned into the arm of the couch, as close as she could get. “Steve, what you’re doing is amazing.”

“I hope so.” He said the words quietly, more to himself than her. Or maybe to those future children currently lying curled and safe under his palm.

“It is,” Sharon insisted. “And I don’t think you should feel weird about it. Or feel weird about not feeling weird. Whatever. Just because other people—other guys—wouldn’t feel comfortable doing it doesn’t mean you _have_ to feel uncomfortable.”

“Thanks,” he said roughly.

“I know this isn’t my place to say—I’m just your bodyguard, right?” Steve smiled faintly at that, and Sharon gave into her impulse and squeezed his free hand. He was very warm, like Aunt Donna always was. “But from where I’m sitting, you’re doing great.”

“Thank you,” he said again, which Sharon took as her signal to let go. Steve nodded to himself. After a moment, he shifted his weight and rolled his eyes. “So, speaking of having to piss all the time.” He shoved awkwardly to his feet. “You’re gonna be here when I get back?” 

“Sure.” She was probably good for another hour or so with the research before she had to get up and take a real break.

She was another two pages in, already lost to the outside world, when she heard the tell-tale clatter of claws. Another moment, and there was Steve, furry and bright-eyed, his tongue hanging out. “Hi, there,” Sharon said, bemused. 

Steve woofed softly and turned towards the doorway, shaking his tail. 

“Oh yeah?” Sharon asked. Steve replied with a bark, not loud but decisive. “Okay, just let me get my shoes.”

When she opened the back door, she found it was afternoon. She followed Steve down the steps. The clouds had rolled in, blocked all but a few patches of the blue sky. The air hung heavy with the promise of rain. Sharon stepped out onto the grass and breathed deep of dirt and unfurling tree buds and wildflowers, and suddenly she was giddy with it, the sights and smells of spring, the far-off chirp of robins in the wood.

Steve was already halfway across the lawn. He barked again, soft but sharp. 

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Sharon told him. She followed him all the way to the edge of the lawn. Beyond was dirt track, and on the other side of the dirt track were rows and rows of tiny corn plants, no higher than Sharon’s ankle. Rich farmland air filled her lungs with every breath. Steve trotted along the edge of the lawn, looking back every so often to make sure Sharon followed. 

They passed behind the shed and the barn—more of an overgrown carport, really, with Romanov’s sports car parked inside—and then on through the little orchard of what Sharon decided were apple trees. “Are we just checking the entire perimeter?” she asked Steve. Steve woofed serenely, which Sharon took for a yes. They crossed the gravel driveway and approached the woods. Sharon had to squint to see into them. It was dark beneath the canopy of oak and maple, with little undergrowth. Robins chirped somewhere within. Sharon couldn’t suppress a shiver. “If I were ten, this place would creep me the hell out.” Steve barked cheerfully and wandered on, along the edge of the woods. 

They’d made almost a full circuit of the yard when the first rain drops hit. Within thirty seconds, the sky had broken open. “Fuck!” Sharon yelled, and ran for the house. Steve loped past her. When she got to the back door, he was already standing impatiently at the foot of the steps. “You’re soaking wet,” she told Steve. “I’m not letting you into the house like this. Go around to the front and I’ll bring a towel.” She pointed, and off Steve went.

It occurred to Sharon as she was searching for the linen closet that maybe refusing to let Captain America into his own house was not precisely what the Avengers had brought her here for. Oh well. Too late now. 

She took the biggest towel she could find, strode through the house, and threw open the door onto the front porch. And stopped. “Uh.”

Steve was standing on the porch, buck-naked and pregnant and very human. “Shit,” he said, blinking through the water dripping down his face. 

“Here,” Sharon said, offering him the towel. “I’ll just—put on some coffee, huh?”

“Sounds great.”

Sharon escaped into the house, remembering that she, too, was soaking wet. The coffee could wait. Instead she went upstairs for a hot shower—her second one of the day. As assignments went, this one wasn’t too bad.

She was just dumping the old grounds out of the coffee maker when Steve appeared in the doorway. Dressed, this time. “I’m probably drinking tea, actually,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I’m only supposed to drink one cup of coffee a day. After that it’s all this herbal crap.”

Sharon considered that. “Tea sounds good to me.”

Belatedly, Sharon realized that lunchtime was hours ago, and they’d both missed it. She dug sandwich fixings out of the fridge, cold cuts and tomatoes and lettuce and more artisanal cheese. Steve joined her silently at the island and built his own sandwich, focusing intently on the evenness of his mustard and his mayo.

Steve screwed the cap back on the mayo, cleared his throat, and said, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but sometimes what my wolf does doesn’t make sense to me when I come back. For example,” he said, eyes on the ceiling, “when I was a wolf it totally made sense to change back so you could dry me off with a towel, without all the fur getting in the way.”

“I see,” Sharon said, trying not to smile. 

Steve caught her at it. His cheeks pinked. “Not that—I mean—like I said. Boundaries.” 

Steve was closer than she’d realized. He was right there next to her at the island, radiating heat like a furnace—or like a werewolf—and peering very intently at his sandwich. It was probably just as well he refused to look at her, because she was definitely flushing, too.

The tea kettle began to whistle, which saved them. “Right,” Sharon said. “Where’s the tea?” 

As Steve had said, the tea was mostly herbal, but she did find a box of Earl Grey. Steve picked peppermint. Steve took his steeping mug in one hand, his plate in the other, and said, “I’m gonna go eat out on the porch, if you want to come.”

The rain had already slowed, and it had apparently fallen mostly straight down, because the deck chairs were only a little bit damp. Sharon took one, and Steve took another. Except for munching and the occasional distant bird chirp, it was quiet. The driveway was just visible from the porch, winding away out of sight.

When Steve was finished, he put his empty plate aside, and said, “So, Carter, huh? Like…”

Time to fess up. Steve’s response might not be better than the times at SHIELD when a colleague finally worked it out, but it’d probably at least be different. “Yeah, like Peggy. She’s my aunt.”

Steve’s eyebrows rose. “I figured that was a coincidence.”

“Nope. I’ve looked up to Aunt Peggy ever since I can remember. I always wanted to follow in her shoes. Working for SHIELD was my dream job.” 

“Damn,” Steve said, with feeling.

“Yeah.” Sharon found her throat getting tight. “Sorry, I don’t really talk about this a lot. I wanted to prove I was good enough on my own, you know? That I wasn’t just getting assignments based on the Carter name. And then it turned out I was working for Nazis and didn’t know it, so nepotism wasn’t really what I should have been worried about.”

“Do you—” Steve cleared his throat. “Do you regret it at all? The time you spent at SHIELD?”

Sharon leaned back in the chair. She sipped at her tea, lingering over it, taking her time. “I know some of the work I did for SHIELD was good work that helped people. I was at the Triskelion when the Chitauri attacked. I helped coordinate efforts that saved lives.”

“But you—but we ended some lives, too. Maybe lives that didn’t need to be ended. I did, anyway. How do you live with that?”

“Fuck if I know. Aunt Peggy told me one time that all we can do is make the best decision we can with the information we have. That’s all I’ve got, you know?”

Steve slid her a glance from the corner of his eye. “Nat told me you went against orders, that day at the Triskelion. When Pierce put a hit out on me.”

Well, that was not a tidbit she’d expected to get passed on to Captain America. Thanks a lot, Romanov. “Like I said.”

“Well, for the record, I appreciate you talking people out of shooting me.” He flashed her one of those grins that melted hearts and foundation across the nation every time he wielded it on TV.

“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” Sharon said.

“And now?”

Sharon waggled her hand. “Ehhhh.”

Steve laughed, delighted. Then a thought seemed to catch him, and he turned rueful. “God, that makes it even more awkward, doesn’t it? You being Peggy’s niece.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know. Maybe you don’t even remember, but I asked you out for coffee one time.”

Sharon’s breath caught. “No, uh, I remember that.”

Steve shook his head. “I felt pretty dumb, once I realized you were a pro. I had no idea. I guess that’s why we leave the espionage to Natasha.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Sharon said carefully.

“You were just doing your job—”

“Not very well.” 

“—and here I was hitting on you, on the job, this old guy who used to be sweet on your _aunt_ —”

“And then that sniper shot Fury.”

Steve paused, his mouth open. He shut it slowly, brow furrowing. Sharon could see the pep-talk coming from a mile away and told herself she didn’t want it. “Sharon,” Steve began. She realized it was the first time he’d said her name. “What were you supposed to do? It was a _sniper_.”

“I had full security responsibility. I had bugs and wiretaps and cameras. You were my full-time assignment.”

“Wait a minute. _You_ planted the bugs in my apartment?”

“Fury’s orders,” Sharon told him. “And then none of it even mattered. I should have seen him in that window. I had eyes on the entire perimeter, and I missed him. You know, for a while I thought Fury died on my watch.”

“Yeah. A lot of us did.”

“ _You_ could have died.”

“Already tried that,” Steve said lightly. “Didn’t take.”

Sharon laughed despairingly. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to try and keep a guy out of trouble who keeps _jumping into it_ , doesn’t know he has a security detail, and isn’t allowed to find out?”

Steve had the nerve to offer her a small smile. “It’s working better this time, right? All out in the open.”

“You’re also doing a lot less jumping right now,” Sharon pointed out.

“Yeah, well.” Steve patted his stomach, looking a trifle smug.

Sharon shook her head and sipped on her tea. The pep talk had worked, she realized. Obscurely, she felt a little better. Something to think about later. She set her tea mug on her plate with a rattle and said, “So, is there a dog brush around here? Would wolf-Steve like to be brushed?”

“Oh, geez,” Steve said, hiding his eyes behind his hand.

“You’re shedding,” Sharon told him. “I bet wolf-you would love it.”

“Yeah, I bet I would.” Steve took a few breaths in and out. Sharon drank the last of her tea. At last Steve said, “God, okay. I’m probably going to lick you, though.”

“Every assignment has its drawbacks,” Sharon said solemnly.

Steve grimaced, uncomforted. “They’re over in the box,” he said, gesturing towards a plastic tub snug against the wall of the house. “I’ll be right back.” He left the door open. Sharon went to root around in the tub, full of garden gloves and Miracle Gro and, aha, several brush-like implements. She picked a flat-headed one with pins and settled on the edge of the deck chair. To pass the time she tugged old hairs out from beneath the pins.

Steve pushed through the open front door, his ears pricked forward with interest. “Oh my god, you’re huge, you know that?” Sharon said. “This is going to take a while.”

Steve sat his furry butt down within easy reach and woofed contentedly. 

“Yeah, I hear you.”

It was mostly his undercoat that was shedding. At first Sharon had trouble getting through the top coat to the loose fur underneath without going so deep that Steve got irritated, but she got the hang of it after a few tries. Steve hung his head from his shoulders, his eyes losing focus. She started at his neck and worked slowly along his back, then down his side, slightly rounded with pups. She brushed especially carefully there. The unmistakable smell of dog joined the smell of damp earth. The rain drizzled on.

Eventually Sharon had brushed all she could reach. “You stay there,” she said. She stepped carefully over him and settled cross-legged on his other side. “You’re going to feel so much better now,” Sharon told him.

Steve responded by turning and pressing his cold, wet nose to her neck. “Okay, no,” Sharon said, shoving him gently away. “No, thank you.” Steve made what sounded suspiciously like a snigger.

Sharon brushed out as much of his undercoat as she could reach. Steve looked a lot less ragged now—majestic, even, if only he weren’t almost asleep. Being brushed was very relaxing, apparently. She scratched behind his ear, and his response to that was settle on his forelegs and then roll over, showing her his belly.

Sharon had been around Aunt Donna and her siblings and her siblings’ restless puppies every so often, growing up. She could count on two fingers the times she’d seen any of them roll over to an outsider—and to werewolves, even the niece was an outsider, if she was human. Showing your belly meant you were really, really comfortable. It meant you trusted someone.

It probably didn’t mean quite the same thing, coming from Steve. None of his instincts seemed to be quite the same as those of the other werewolves Sharon knew. Still, Sharon swallowed around a sudden lump in her throat. She rubbed him along his sternum, which he seemed to like, and then gently stroked his belly fur between his milk teats, swollen and ready for pups. “As field assignments go, this one’s pretty okay,” she told him.

Steve rolled back over on his stomach, and then, as promised, he licked her hand. “Thanks buddy,” she said.

* * *

The drizzle kept up the rest of the day. After his brushing, Steve disappeared upstairs; when Sharon passed down the hall an hour later, she heard very human snoring. Sharon sat at the kitchen table with a fresh cup of coffee and browsed international news. There was nothing about the Avengers. 

Sharon was not used to sitting still for so long. Even visits to her grandparents’ farmhouse had been full of noise and cousins and cooking. She’d had surveillance assignments less entertaining than this, but she’d at least had spotty audio and grainy camera footage to focus on; she had had work to do, however tedious it was.

It must have been an hour later that she heard Steve moving around upstairs. A few moments later he walked into the kitchen, and she looked up from her latest piece of research on dog breeding. “So was I embarrassing?” he asked. He was smiling a little, but if that was meant to convince her he was joking, it didn’t work.

“You were not embarrassing. You enjoyed getting brushed and sticking your wet nose in my face—”

He moaned unintelligibly.

“—which is completely normal wolf behavior, in my experience. If the wolf is a smartass.”

Steve laughed and sat down opposite her. “Am I smartass wolf?”

“Mm, no more than you are as a human, probably.”

“Oh, thanks.” His whole face brightened as he smiled. He really liked being teased. Sharon found herself hoping the other Avengers had also discovered this fact and made regular use of it. It seemed like something she could count on Romanov for, at least.

“Steve,” she said, before she gave herself time to think. “That time when you asked me out for coffee.”

The easy delight of a moment before drained out of his face. “Yeah?”

“I wanted to say yes.”

He fixed his gaze on the grain of the tabletop. “You don’t have to, you know—”

“I’m not just saying this to make you feel better.”

“Then why are you?” he asked quietly.

What a great question. “Okay, I am saying it to make you feel better, but only because it’s the truth. By that point I felt like I knew you pretty well—or parts of you, anyway. The song you hummed while loading the dishwasher, how much bacon you ate in a week—”

“That’s not creepy at all,” Steve muttered.

“—your elderly neighbor from downstairs you always opened the door for. You seemed like the kind of guy I’d take a chance on.” Sharon shrugged. “You know, if you weren’t Captain America, and I weren’t professionally spying on your entire home life.”

Steve’s shoulders slumped a little more. “Yeah, that does put a damper on it. Although I have to say I run into the first problem more often than the second.”

This conversation was not having the effect Sharon had hoped. She’d have been better off keeping her mouth shut, probably. She reached across the table and took Steve’s hand, big and hot-blooded in her grip. “I’m just saying, you don’t need to feel dumb. Your instincts were good.”

“Missed my window, though, I guess. Or, was there ever a window?”

Sharon drew her hands back and clasped them around her repurposed tea mug, now a quarter-full of hours-old coffee. “Probably not. We didn’t know each other before that, and afterwards, with SHIELD dissolving, you finding out who I was—it didn’t seem like something to follow up on. We both had bigger problems.”

“Now that is the truth.” He gave her a rueful smile. “Am I ever going to meet you when you’re not on the job?”

Sharon grimaced. “It doesn’t seem likely, does it?”

“I guess not.” 

“I mean, unless you hang around the same mediocre bars in McLean that all us off-duty spooks drink at.”

Unexpectedly, Steve winced. Sharon had a moment to wonder if he had some traumatic connection to McLean, Virginia that hadn’t been in any of her briefs, and then Steve pressed his hand to the side of his stomach. “They’re moving around,” he said, seeing her expression.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” He looked down at himself and smiled, soft and private and so tender that it made Sharon’s heart ache to look at. “They used to a lot more, when they were smaller. Not much room in there for them anymore.”

“I guess not.” There hadn’t been any question of Sharon doing her job before, but now, watching Steve, she felt the certainty of it in her bones: she would do anything it took to protect him and his litter. Even if, at the moment, there didn’t appear to be anything they needed protecting from.

* * *

Dinner was tacos, because that would give them leftovers for the next day. Sharon cooked the meat while Steve chopped tomatoes and onions and lettuce. “Where does your food come from?” Sharon asked. “Does someone do delivery?”

Steve coughed. “It’s a drone.”

“What,” Sharon said.

“Somebody at Stark Industries loads a drone with groceries, and they get dropped out here in front of the porch.”

“Huh.”

“The future’s weird, right?” He offered her a small, self-deprecating smile.

“I guess you’d know.”

“You know cars have safety belts nowadays,” he told her, eyes dancing.

“Oh, really.”

“Yeah, and there’s these gadgets now, people can type out messages and you’ll get them right away. They’re called pagers.”

“Wow,” Sharon said, unable to keep from smiling. “The modern age, huh?” 

“It’s really something,” he said. He fell quiet, dicing the tomatoes with maybe more than necessary care. Sharon left him alone with his thoughts. When the meat was finished, they loaded their tacos in silence, until Steve said, “You want to show me a movie?”

Sharon looked up from her carefully-spread black beans. “What?”

“It’s a thing I do. I’m still trying to catch up, you know, on the stuff I missed. I’ve got a list going, but when someone’s around, sometimes they’ll watch something with me. Something they like. But if you’ve got something else you have to do tonight, that’s fine.”

“I really don’t,” she told him, and was rewarded with a smile that could fracture hearts and stop traffic. “Do you have any requests?”

He shook his head. “It’s your show. I’ll tell you if I’ve seen it before.”

It turned out that the big landscape painting that covered most of one living room wall was on a panel that slid back, with a screen behind it. The house had access to all the main streaming sites. Sharon spent ten minutes scrolling through her options, frozen with indecision—what cultural touchstone was she personally responsible for Steve seeing?—before Steve said, amused, “It doesn’t have to be an important movie. There’s classes for that, you know.”

Sharon remembered her vague plans for the night before. “How do you feel about comedies? Have you seen _Legally Blonde_?”

Steve had not seen _Legally Blonde_. “I haven’t watched this in over a decade,” Sharon warned him. “It might not be good anymore.”

“That’s okay,” Steve said comfortably from the other end of the couch. The couch had the best view of the screen; he’d stuffed some pillows behind his back for support. He was resting his plate precariously on his knees, since he had no lap to speak of. “I’ll learn something, right?”

“Maybe,” Sharon said dubiously.

 _Legally Blonde_ was still good, though, and Steve was entertaining in his own right, because he seemed to treat movies as a kind of spectator sport. This included yelling at the screen. “What a schmuck!” he said when Warner broke up with Elle. He turned to Sharon, full of outrage. “He’s a schmuck.”

“I don’t disagree,” Sharon said, trying not to laugh. 

At the forty-five-minute mark, Steve apologetically called for a bathroom break. Sharon took the opportunity to get a glass of water. The sky had started to clear, she noticed. The last rays of sun shone golden on the glistening, wet landscape. She checked her phone for updates. The Avengers had been spotted in the vicinity of a mysterious sinkhole in the Australian outback. That would the void, then. Australian national security forces were preventing anyone other than the Avengers from approaching the sinkhole. “Jarvis, can you tell me anything else? Are they okay?”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” said the voice from the ceiling.

In the living room, she found Steve with his palm pressed to his belly, his gaze turned inward. “Everything okay?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah. They’re just restless.” He spoke with a confidence that seemed to elude him regarding every other aspect of his werewolf self, as though out of all of it, this was the one thing made sense.

“Yeah?” she said, smiling. 

Steve considered her a moment. “Do you want to feel them?”

“Um,” she began, but Steve patted the couch cushion next to him, looking hopeful. She couldn’t say no to that. She sat and, after an encouraging glance from Steve, pressed her hand to his broad, pregnant belly. At first she could only feel his overheated skin and distant beat of his pulse. Then came a tap against her palm. “Oh,” she said. In the corner of her eye, Steve was practically glowing. Something—the heel of a tiny foot, maybe—pushed against Sharon’s hand. “Hey, there,” she said.

After a minute or two, the movement seemed to slow. Sharon shifted and put her hand in her lap. The remote was down at the other end of the couch; Elle scowled with determination, frozen mid-montage. Sharon stayed where she was and listened to Steve breathe. 

“Sharon—”

She kissed him. It was easy; he was right there. She barely had to lean up to catch his mouth, soft, already open a little when she got to it. Steve sighed against her, a sound that seemed to capture all Sharon was feeling: yes, this. This at last. “You’re on the clock,” he murmured.

Sharon pulled away just far enough to meet his gaze. “As we’ve established, I’m pretty much always on the clock.” She paused in case he was inclined to argue. He searched her eyes, but whether he was looking for an excuse to say yes or an excuse to say no, Sharon couldn’t guess. “Besides,” Sharon said solemnly, “you kind of are the job.”

Steve took this in. A grin teased at the corner of his mouth. “Are you saying you’re going to do the job?”

“Maybe,” Sharon said, delighted.

“Is that a service the agency provides?”

“On very special occasions.” Sharon angled in to kiss him again. Cautiously he slid his hand up her arm, splaying his fingers across her back. She was getting a crick in her neck; she pulled away so that she could rearrange herself on the couch, tucking her legs under her. Now she was a little taller than Steve, and damn, she liked the view. She took his face in both hands and put her mouth his mouth again, plush and soft and werewolf-warm. Steve groaned against her, and the sound went straight down Sharon’s spine and lodged in her clit.

“God, it’s been—” Steve cut himself off to kiss her.

“A while?” she said, next time they came up for air.

“Months. Since I started—you know. Since I started showing.” He’d moved to her jaw, dropping kisses there one by one. “It’s been the worst. I’ve been—ugh.” 

“Horny as hell?” Sharon offered. She leaned up to kiss his cheekbone.

“God,” Steve said again, more a groan than a word. “They said I’d cool off, the last few months. The hormones would calm down, or whatever. They were fucking liars, you know that?”

“More for me,” Sharon said. She let her hand fall to Steve’s stomach and beyond, down, down, until she found Steve in his sweatpants, already mostly hard. 

As soon as her fingers grazed the fabric, Steve’s breath hitched. “I’m not going to last very long,” he warned.

“Cool,” Sharon said. She caught his mouth again. “Damn, I love your mouth.” Steve laughed against her, a huff of warm, amused air against his lips. She squeezed him through his sweatpants, just she could feel that his reaction to that, too. His hands slid up her sides, under her shirt, finding her bra. “Mm, naked,” Sharon said. “Good idea.”

Steve stilled.

“What?”

“It’s okay if you don’t—if you aren’t—”

Sharon pulled back, mystified. “What?”

“I look a little weird, is all,” Steve said, eyes fixed on some point past her shoulder.

“Steve,” Sharon said. She swept her hand over his stomach, heavy and full and precious. “I’m here, okay? I’m into it.” She leaned over, chasing his gaze until she caught it, and then she kissed him again as she tugged at the hem of his hoodie. 

His hand closed over hers. She thought maybe they’d reached an impasse, but then Steve took a deep breath and said, “I think my back would be happier if we didn’t do this on the couch.”

“Fair.” 

As Sharon followed Steve up the stairs, she noticed the TV screen had gone idle. Later, Elle Woods.

Steve took Sharon to his room, down the hall from hers. He pulled his hoodie over his head and tossed it in a corner, and then he sat on the bed and let Sharon carefully strip him of his t-shirt. There he was, broad-shouldered and round-bellied, eyeing her a little anxiously, still. 

She looked him over appreciatively, head to toe, taking her time: letting him see it. Slowly Steve brightened, confidence warming his expression like a sunrise. “You, too,” he said, gesturing.

Getting her undressed was a joint effort: her slipping out of her t-shirt and stepping between his legs, him skating his hands up her sides and unclasping her bra. His gaze caught on her breasts. “Yeah?” she said, grinning. It’d been a while since anybody had looked at her naked body quite that hungrily. Steve snapped his mouth shut and began working on the button of her jeans.

The underwear Sharon kept in her emergency duffel was pretty prosaic, which suddenly seemed like a grave oversight on her part. This was not the kind emergency she had in mind when she packed it. But Steve didn’t seem to see anything disappointing in her blue cotton panties. He hooked his fingers in the waistband and tugged, until her panties hung around her ankles, along with her jeans. She stepped out of all of it and kicked the whole pile away, to be worried about at a later date.

Steve was staring again. When Sharon caught his eye, he coughed. “You look really good,” he said hoarsely.

“So do you,” Sharon said, and bent to kiss him before he could argue with that. Steve’s hands closed around her hips; he brushed across her hipbones with his thumbs, which felt like two hot coals on Sharon’s sensitive skin. All her awareness narrowed to those few points of contact: Steve’s hands on her, Steve’s jaw in her cupped hand, Steve’s eager mouth. Heat throbbed gently in her clit. The angle made her back twinge.

“How do you want to do this?” she murmured.

Steve paused, pulled back. “I don’t—I haven’t—” He grimaced. “I don’t know, exactly. This might take some experimentation.” He swept his hands up her sides again. He seemed to really have a thing for her ribs. Maybe he didn’t even notice; his gaze was fixed with such intensity on her breasts that it was difficult to imagine there was much room in his head for anything else.

“You just gonna look, or—?” Sharon asked. That shook Steve out of his daze. He closed his hand over her breast, his blood-hot palm pressing against her erect nipple. Okay, yeah. That was good. “More of that,” Sharon told him.

Steve took this as a suggestion to put his mouth on her nipple.

“God _damn_ ,” Sharon said. Steve smiled around her nipple and licked across it. “Okay,” Sharon said, “that’s it, I need us to both be on the bed now.” Steve had the nerve to look smug, which Sharon had absolutely no problem with as long as he put his mouth back on her _very soon_.

Finding a comfortable position did take some maneuvering. They found it was easiest with Sharon on her back and Steve on top, leaning on those incredible arms. Miracles of science, that’s what they were. His belly hung low and brushed against Sharon every time he moved. He mouthed at her nipple again, pinching gently with his teeth until it was tingly, not quite sore. 

“So you _are_ good at everything,” Sharon grumbled. She felt swollen with desire, molten with it. “Come on, what’d you say about not lasting?” she said, shoving lightly at Steve’s chest. “You gonna put it in me or what? You gonna show me your super soldier schlong?”

“Are you serious,” Steve said flatly. Sharon grinned beatifically up at him until the corner of his mouth curled up, clearly despite his best efforts.

He crawled off to finally shimmy out of his sweatpants. He came back with a condom from the bedside table and sat back on his haunches to roll it on. Sharon sat up to get a better look at what he was packing, a detail sadly lacking from her many security briefs. He did not disappoint. In Sharon’s estimation, he was of a size just on the far edge of comfortable, which was to say: perfect. “Okay, yeah,” she breathed. “I want that in me.”

“I live to serve,” Steve said.

For all Steve’s worries, getting positioned wasn’t very difficult. Sharon bent her knees and spread them wide, giving Steve a good, clear look at her, and Steve settled in between them and lined himself up. Some of the weight of his belly settled on her, but not in a bad way. “Just do whatever feels comfortable,” she told him, squeezing his arm.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, giving her a wink—a _wink_ —and then he pressed inside.

“Ohhhh my god,” Sharon said. Steve was a stretch, delicious, very nearly too much and exactly right. Above her, Steve had lost his smirk. His mouth fell open; his shoulders strained like he might go off right that instant if he weren’t careful. He hadn’t even bottomed out yet.

Sharon tried an experimental thrust, and Steve grunted and shook his head. “Give me—give me a minute.”

They hung in that moment together, breath heaving, eyes half-shut. Steve shed heat like a radiator. The places where he was touching her, her stomach and insides of her thighs and creases of her hips, were already slick with sweat.

Steve hung his head a little lower and sank in further. “You feel really good,” Sharon said, choked with sensation and the effort of holding absolutely still.

“You, too,” Steve gasped. 

Sharon imagined him sounding the same after a good sparring session, breathless and sweating and urgent. Fucking or fighting, Steve Rogers gave it his all. “Captain Fucking America,” Sharon said.

“At your service,” Steve said. He began to move. He pulled out with infinite, maddening care; he thrust again with just as much caution. 

“You’re killing me, Rogers,” Sharon groaned. Steve put his head down, the picture of determination, and withdrew again. The next thrust was just a little rougher, a little more certain. “Fuck, yes,” Sharon breathed.

Steve pulled back again, pushed halfway in—and came, just like that, with a stutter of his hips and a sudden, punched-out gasp. “Oh,” Sharon said, before she could think better of it.

“I told you,” Steve said. He hung above her, chest heaving. “Sorry. Fuck.”

“Hey,” Sharon said. This time Steve looked at her, still half out of it. Sharon pushed up on her elbows and craned her neck, looking for a kiss, and after a moment Steve got the idea and met her half way. Steve kissing her, his dick softening in her pussy: not bad. “I bet you can make it up to me in a bit,” she told him.

“In a bit,” he agreed, still breathless. Carefully he pulled out and rolled onto his side next to her, fumbling to knot the condom. With effort, he managed to drop it over his side of the bed, where Sharon pretended she’d seen a wastebasket earlier. His eyes fell shut.

He was going to pass out, she thought, a little fondly. He was going to leave her high and dry, and she wasn’t even going to be mad about it. If she were a pregnant werewolf who hadn’t gotten any in who knew how many months, she probably wouldn’t have lasted long, either.

Idly she dropped her hand to her clit. It was hot under her touch, and slick, once she dipped down towards her vulva and got her fingers wet. She settled into the sense memory of a few moments before: the pressure of Steve filling her, his breath on her face, the friction of his belly against hers as he thrust—

A hand closed over Sharon’s. “I can do that,” Steve said sleepily. He shifted a little closer, so that he was within easy reach, and he picked up where she left off. “Tell me what’s good.”

Sharon’s instructions mostly consisted of things like _there_ and _a little lower_ and _more_. “You could put a finger in, if you want,” she said. Steve trailed his forefinger lower and circled teasingly around her rim. God, she was so wet for it. That chill fondness from a bit ago had melted away; she wanted to come. “Rogers,” she warned.

Steve laughed softly to himself, the asshole, and pressed inside. It wasn’t as much as she wanted but still enough to make her toes curl, especially once he started thrusting in and out with it. She dropped her hand to her clit again, and Steve didn’t protest this time. When her orgasm finally came, clenching through her vagina and fizzing out to her toes, it was a joint effort. “Good work, team,” Sharon said with a sigh.

“Mm,” Steve said. He pulled his finger out of her, and his hand fell still. When she looked over, he was already asleep.

“You’re really sweet,” Sharon told him, and stretched up to kiss his forehead. She considered her bed, which was down the hall, and the lamp on the other side of Steve, which seemed very nearly as far. She considered that she was lying in a vintage farmhouse retrofitted by Tony Stark. “Jarvis,” she tried. “Can you turn off that light?”

“Of course, Ms. Carter.” The light winked out, leaving the room dark but for the clock face glowing softly blue on the wall. 

“Thanks, Jarvis,” she said.

“You’re welcome, Ms. Carter,” came that disembodied voice.

Sharon went to sleep.

* * *

Sharon woke to an empty bed. She stretched, enjoying the pleasant soreness, and then grabbed her discarded clothes from the floor and wandered down the hall for a shower.

She found Steve in the kitchen with the coffee pot. “Morning,” he said.

“Is that your one cup for the day?” Sharon went to the cabinet for a mug.

“Yep, this is it.” Obligingly Steve filled her mug. “So, uh, thank you. For last night. Thanks for taking pity on me and my poor hormones.”

“Hey, I enjoyed myself,” she said, giving him a friendly shoulder bump. “No pity required.”

He flushed. “Well, if you want to give it another shot while you’re here, I’d like to try and show you a better time.”

“Oh yeah?” Sharon said.

Steve grinned sheepishly. “I gotta try and redeem myself somehow. Just say the word.”

“Well, if your honor’s at stake,” Sharon mused, “maybe we can fit it into our tightly-packed schedule.”

Steve flushed at that, pink and pleased. He was wearing another oversized tee over his track pants, and his shower-damp hair stuck up every which way. With his coffee cup in hand, he looked domestic, comfortable. Relaxed, in a way she doubted very many people ever got to saw him.

There was a part of Sharon that was ready and willing to _fit him in_ right then. There was another part that just wanted to sit back and enjoy the company, the easy intimacy. This job was feeling less like a job by the moment. That was bad, probably. It’d be a shock to go back to Langley, to a desk and research and the lowest rung and an apartment with no one in it but her. 

“Speaking of, what _is_ the schedule for today?” she asked.

She was not surprised to learn that the schedule was more of the same. This time she joined Steve for his morning sojourn through the garden while the sun shone gently through the mist. Steve pointed out the lettuce plants, where their taco lettuce had come from the night before, and the tomato plants, and the peas. A few of the pea pods were fattening up just enough to pick. “Were you a big gardener before—everything?” Sharon asked.

“I’m from Brooklyn,” he told her, a smile crinkling his eyes. “I’m a city boy all the way. But I figured I had to have something going on out here, or I’d go stir crazy. The tomatoes were probably a mistake, though,” he said wistfully. “Nobody’ll be around to pick ‘em.” 

“You could come back,” Sharon offered. “Visit.”

“Probably not. I gotta go be Captain America again. No time for this kind of stuff anymore.” 

Sharon couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

She spent the late morning back in her office on the couch, reading. She’d learned as much as she could stomach about emergency c-sections on dogs, her worst-case scenario. Now she was into werewolf pregnancies in general. The research there was in some ways even scarcer than for labor and delivery, or maybe it was just that they were so goddamn weird; weirder still for cross-sex lups like Steve. How _did_ the body regulate the partial transformation during pregnancy so that two-legged Steve had a uterus but not a tail?

What little Sharon could find exploring that question had clearly been derived from unwilling participants. She skimmed enough to determine that the information was useless, closed the article, and realized she was hungry. 

She was retrieving the leftover taco meat from the fridge when Steve strode in. “We have to go.”

It took her half a second to process this, which was half a second too long. She’d gotten comfortable. “Right,” she said, and closed the fridge.

“Jarvis, call Hill,” Steve said, and then he was out the back door. Sharon grabbed her jacket off the hook, checked that her revolver was still in her belt holster, jammed her feet into her shoes, and followed Steve down the steps. 

The yard was empty. Sharon searched the shadows cast by the shed and barn, scanned the fence line: nothing. “Steve?” Sharon said. But Steve already halfway to the woods. Sharon gave a last glance behind her, looking for threats, and then sprinted after him. She caught up just as he reached the tree line. “ _Steve_ ,” she hissed. “What’s happening?”

“Can’t you hear it?” Steve stared past her, wide-eyed. 

Sharon glanced behind her, but she still saw only a peaceful yard. What she could see of the driveway from this angle was empty. There was no sound of a threat. In fact, there wasn’t much sound at all, even from the woods. The perpetual chirping had fallen silent. “I don’t hear anything,” she said.

Steve shook his head sharply, like a dog trying to dislodge a fly. “We have to go,” he repeated, and turned.

Sharon caught his arm. “There’s a car in the barn. We’d have to get the keys—”

“I can hotwire it,” Steve said vaguely. He shook his head again. “No, I think—we have to get into the woods.” He turned away again and headed into the woods, down the same deer path from the day before. Sharon gave a last glance at the house and followed him, her hand on her weapon.

Once her eyes adjusted, Sharon found they were on a path, probably courtesy of the local deer. It wound deeper into the woods than Sharon would have guessed the woods even went. She kept expecting at any moment to come to the other side of it, but the view ahead seemed as dark as the one behind.

There was still no bird song, nor the chirping of any squirrels. The silence felt eerie; there was only the occasional crack of a twig under someone’s foot. The deer path went on and on, and Steve showed no sign of slowing down. He paused now and then to shake his head, sharp and irritated. Sharon glanced behind them every so often. She saw no one.

They were maybe ten minutes into the woods when Sharon heard a totally unexpected buzzing sound. Steve’s head came up at the same time. A moment later, he shoved Sharon against the trunk of an oak tree. The sound came closer until it was right overhead, and that’s when Sharon caught a glimpse of it through the foliage. It was a drone maybe ten or twenty feet about the tree tops. The sound receded and then swung back a gain a few moments later. It was flying a search pattern.

Sharon drew her weapon and raised an eyebrow at Steve. She watched him weigh the same options she was: shoot the drone out of the sky and possibly draw attention to their position, or leave it and hoped nobody noticed them? After a moment, Steve shook his head. Sharon held her fire and counted her breaths until the drone seemed well past.

“See, I’m not crazy,” Steve whispered fiercely to Sharon, who had suggested nothing of the sort. “Someone’s out there.”

“What’s the plan? Circle back to the house?”

“I don’t want to go back. It feels bad.” Steve made a face at this. “Sorry, I know that makes no sense—” 

“It’s fine,” Sharon interrupted. She’d get nowhere arguing with what were clearly werewolf instincts, never mind that Steve was walking upright right now. “Where does the path lead?”

Steve stilled. He gazed into the middle distance for a few beats. “Water. I think there’s a place to drink. I haven’t—I’ve only ever been in the woods as a wolf.”

“How far do the woods extend?”

“Far.” Another long pause while Steve tried to convert distances in his head from _werewolf_ to _human_. “A couple more miles, probably.”

They could head out that way and hope they made themselves difficult to find. Sharon didn’t see another option; it was go forward or go back. Or stay here, she supposed, but she was getting as antsy as Steve to put some real distance between them and the farmhouse. “Let’s go,” she said softly.

Twice more they hid from drones weaving back and forth across the forest. Clearly the drones weren’t equipped with infrared, or they’d have spotted Steve long ago. He’d stand out like a beacon. Eventually Steve and Sharon came to the water source Steve mentioned, a stream narrow enough they could cross without getting their feet wet. A bird chirped in the distance, which Sharon took for a good sign. 

Steve was starting to slow down. “I have trouble getting a full breath these days,” he said, when Sharon asked. He gestured to his stomach. “Decreased lung capacity. I’m fine, though.”

“If you’re sure.” 

They’d been creeping along for almost an hour when Sharon noticed something looming directly ahead in the gloom. As they approached, Sharon realized it was a structure. Her hand went automatically to her firearm. The trail took a final turn, and there it was: the remains of a cabin. The doorway gaped open, dark and deeply unwelcoming. The door had long since rotted away. “We could stop a minute,” Steve said, very casually.

Steve needed a break after barely an hour of hiking? Sharon didn’t like the sound of that. “Sure.”

Steve peered in the cabin’s doorway. To Sharon the opening seemed as ancient and organic as a cave mouth. “I think I’d feel better in there.” 

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Sharon said.

Steve sat carefully in the corner of the cabin, his back to the front wall—the corner farthest from the doorway’s line of sight. Sharon sat in the door itself, because she wanted a look at anything that was coming and because the dark, rotting confines of the cabin felt least oppressive with the open woods in front of her.

The woods remained eerily silent. That one bird chirp had begun to seem like an anomaly. “What did you hear, before?” Sharon asked.

Steve was quiet for long enough that Sharon strained to hear his breath, just to make sure he was still breathing. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “It sounded like—it was like—it was a needle. In my ear.”

Sharon processed this. “Like a dog whistle.”

“I—maybe?”

“You know, I was doing some reading, and the research said the barriers between the human self and wolf self are thinner during pregnancy.” Sharon was pretty sure Aunt Donna would have been irritated by almost every word of that, especially _barrier_ , _human_ , and the idea of more than one self. She kind of wished Aunt Donna were there right then to irritated by them. Surely she’d have more insight into the situation than Sharon did. “It’d make sense if your wolf senses were bleeding through more than normal.”

“You did some reading? About me?”

“Not about you specifically. Lups in general. I have to live up to my supposed ‘field medic’ skills, you know.”

“’Supposed?’”

“I mean, I took a couple of courses when I started at SHIELD. I’ve delivered first aid a couple of times. I’ve definitely never delivered any werewolf babies.”

Steve laughed softly. “Me, either.”

Obscurely, Sharon felt a little heartened. They were in the woods with no help and an unknown enemy after them, but Steve had caught his breath now, and he felt well enough to joke. It wasn’t nothing.

“Hey,” Steve said, “do you have your phone on you? I could try and contact Jarvis.”

“Fancy.” Sharon unlocked the phone and handed it over. Her wallpaper painted Steve’s face in a soft blue glow. 

A few moments later, Steve said, “Your phone doesn’t have any signal.”

“No _signal_? We’re not even an hour from Buffalo.” 

Steve handed the phone over. He wasn’t lying: she had zero bars. “Maybe they’re jamming it somehow.” 

“Fuck.”

“Yeah, and another thing. You remember when I asked Jarvis to call Hill?”

“Yeah?”

“Did he answer?”

Sharon had to think about that. “I don’t think so.”

“Jarvis always answers.”

Sharon took that in. “So it’s just us.”

“I think so.”

They were in a cabin whose walls might cave in at any moment, even without anyone lobbing artillery their way or, say, throwing a rock. Sharon had a revolver, two extra clips, and a cell phone with no signal. “Do you have anything on you?” Sharon asked. “Anything we might be able to use in a fight? Or to jerry-rig something with?”

There was a pause in the dark. “I have a watch.”

“Does the watch have signal?”

“It’s analogue.” 

Of course it was. 

Maybe it’d be best to stay here. At least the woods were cover. On the other hand, they were both going to get hungry eventually, and neither SHIELD nor the CIA put much emphasis on woodcraft as an aspect of espionage. Sharon had her doubts about Steve being particularly good at it, either, although as a wolf he could probably at least keep himself from starving.

A hitch in Steve’s breath caught Sharon’s attention. She waited, and after a moment, the sound came again. In the gloom, Sharon could just make out Steve’s hand, pressed to his stomach. Sharon’s heart rate kicked up a notch. “Steve?”

Steve took another sharp breath and met her eye. His expression was sickly. “So you know what you said about delivering werewolf babies?”

It took Sharon way too long to get his meaning. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. “You’ve got to be fucking _kidding_ me.”

“Really wish I was.” His voice had a strained quality to it that Sharon didn’t like at all. 

She gave the woods another glance and then pushed to her feet and ducked inside the cabin. She knelt next to Steve and palmed his belly. He was rock-hard, in the midst of a contraction. “Yeah, I think you’re in labor.”

“Yeah,” Steve said shakily. “I really didn’t want to do this yet.”

“Much less here?” Sharon said, a feeble attempt to lighten the mood. Steve gave her a grimace that maybe was meant to be a smile. “Okay. So, you know you’re going to need to be a wolf for this part.”

“Yeah.” 

“Hey.” Sharon cupped the back of Steve’s neck, already sweaty. He stilled under her hand. “I read up on this. You’ll be fine. Wolves have it so much easier than people. You just have to push for a while, and then there’ll be puppies.” Barring complications, but Sharon wasn’t going to so much as raise that possibility in Steve’s mind.

Steve closed his eyes and took a deep breath that got cut off by another contraction. He hung his head through it, and when it was over, he met Sharon’s gaze. In the dimness, she caught the faint glint of his eye. “You’ll be here, right?” he said.

“I’ll stick as close as I can. If someone comes around, I might have to leave the cabin, but I’ll be back.” She realized she was soothing him as if he were a civilian, but just now he looked scared like a civilian. Nothing in Steve’s long and bizarre life had prepared him for childbirth. Sharon gave into impulse and kissed his sweaty forehead. “It’s okay. I’ll keep you guys safe, all right?” It was a promise. A vow. This time, no one was getting hurt on her watch. 

Even in the gloom, Steve’s sudden smile was unmistakable. He squeezed her hand. “I know you will.” 

While Sharon struggled to absorb that solar plexus blow, that statement of absolute faith, Steve was already tugging his t-shirt over his forehead. He kicked off his shoes next, and then he shimmied off his track pants, awkwardly, without even bothering to get up.

Sharon had only seen a wolf transform once. It had been one of her cousins, maybe four years old. One moment he was running around the outside of the wading pool in swimming trunks; the next he’d lost even those and was on the ground, rolling back and forth until his skin melted into fur. A relative had swooped in to carry him away, already scolding him: transforming was _private_.

Now she watched Steve, naked as a babe and so profoundly pregnant, lie on the cabin’s filthy floor and begin to change. His pale skin was bright in the dimness, a canvas stretched over a shifting frame that grew shorter, thicker. The limbs reoriented. Steve shifted into something else, a confused, liminal, ever-changing form. It took thirty seconds for that form to settle, for Steve to become wolf and only wolf. 

He whined softly. Sharon stroked his side. The contractions had carried over into his wolf form. “You’re doing fine,” she told him.

Sharon stationed herself at the doorway, weapon drawn. She listened for any stray sound, any indignant squirrel in the distance, any threatening buzz of another drone. She wasn’t sure Steve wouldn’t have been better off tucked under a fallen tree somewhere, someplace that wasn’t obviously man-made, but wolf-Steve seemed to have such human instincts that she doubted he’d have gone for it.

She listened for Steve, too. He labored very quietly; all she caught was an occasional panted breath. She went over to check on him every so often and shine her phone’s flashlight over him. On one of these check-ins, she spread his discarded t-shirt under his hindquarters. Might as well try and minimize the infant lups’ exposure to the cabin’s everything.

In the end, it wasn’t a drone’s buzz or a careless footstep that alerted Sharon. It was the familiar static of a walkie-talkie. She felt as much as heard Steve’s abrupt alarm. “Shh,” she said, very softly. 

She didn’t want any chance of a fire fight near the cabin. The walls were like rotted tissue; they’d admit any bullet and then probably collapse after, onto Steve. She made a split-second decision and slipped outside. She braced herself against a tree, straining to hear which direction the sound of the walkie-talkie had come from. Three minutes, five minutes of her holding absolutely still, barely breathing, and then she heard it again, in the direction she and Steve had come from. The person was maybe thirty yards away. 

Probably they’d already seen the cabin and reported it. Probably she should have expected this and stationed herself down that path to begin with, rather than staying with Steve. Fucking hindsight.

She crept along the path until just before the turn east, towards the farmhouse. She slid behind a tree and peeked between the two forks of its trunk. Barely twenty seconds later, the owner of the walkie-talkie came into view. Male, maybe six foot, dressed in gray fatigues and a stocking cap. It took Sharon a moment to realize the bulky-looking gun in his hands, marked with bright yellow stripes, was a taser gun.

Sharon breathed through an instant of pure, icy fury. Then she put it away in a box, just like they’d taught her in her first year of field training, and focused on the task at hand. She took an inventory of the guy’s other gear. He had a handgun holster and a knife sheath on his belt as well as the walkie-talkie. He wore a backpack, contents unknown. He moved too heavily for stealth, but too slowly to make very good progress. He was, in a word, an amateur. 

Sharon didn’t want to get tased. She didn’t want to make noise. She didn’t want to kill this idiot, much. She stepped into the path just behind him and, as he turned, drove the butt of her revolver into his temple. He crumbled to the path like a heap of wet laundry. 

She had at least a couple of minutes before he came to. She dragged him a dozen feet off the path, behind a convenient tree, to keep from getting surprised by anyone else coming the way he’d come. She stripped his belt out of his fatigues. She dumped his backpack out and found a bounty: zip-ties _and_ steel handcuffs. She bound the guy’s hands behind his back with one of the zip-ties and propped him against a tree trunk. She took out her phone and found the app she wanted. Then she waited.

It was another five minutes before the guy groaned awake. Sharon began the app with a press of her finger, tucked her phone in her jacket pocket, and drew her gun. When the guy realized she was there, his eyes widened and his mouth fell open, but Sharon cut him off. “Do you have a license for that taser?”

His face twisted into a scowl. “None of your concern.” His voice was low and gravely. A tough guy. That would make this harder.

“Good. You’re here on private property—” _Whose_ property, Sharon had no idea, but it didn’t seem important. “—with an illegal weapon and backpack of suspicious contents. Let’s talk about why.”

“You can’t go through my stuff,” the guy said, expression darkening. “You don’t have a warrant.”

“I have a gun pointed at your head,” she said calmly. What little color the guy had in his face drained out, leaving him a sickly off-white. “You’re hunting someone. With a _taser_.” She couldn’t quite keep the mingled fury and disdain out of her voice. “Who?”

“What are you gonna do, shoot me?” he sneered.

“Maybe,” Sharon said. It was not standard procedure, but this was not a standard mission. A few hundred feet ahead, Steve labored quietly, out of sight. _I know you will._ “Or I gag you and leave you here. Your drones didn’t spot me earlier. How long would it take your buddies to find you?”

“Don’t,” the guy said, and then he scowled harder. Sharon waited. “Steve Rogers,” the guy blurted. “We’re after Steve Rogers. Gonna ransom him.”

Sharon received that information impassively. “You were going to kidnap Captain America and hold him with zip-ties.”

“We’ve got handcuffs, too. And anyway, tase the guy enough, it won’t matter.”

“Mm,” Sharon said. “What makes you think he’s here?”

“Well, _you’re_ here, aintcha?” The guy had the balls to grin at her, showing his shiny white teeth. “Cop with a gun, just hanging out in the woods? He’s around here somewhere.”

Point to him. Sharon leaned in. “And why would Steve Rogers need a _cop with a gun_? He’s got that shield, doesn’t he? All that super strength?”

The guy seemed to have forgotten he didn’t want to tell her everything. “He’s hiding out in that weird old farmhouse. Who the hell knows why. Always has an Avenger or two around, babysitting him. That fucking big dog, too.” Bingo. Sharon allowed herself a single careful exhale. Steve’s secret was still safe. “But everybody knows the Avengers are in Australia right now.”

“And you weren’t worried about the big dog?” 

The guy shrugged. “Taser works on dogs, too.”

They were interrupted by the scratchy static of the walkie-talkie coming to life on the ground a couple of feet away. “Frenchie, you there?”

Sharon cocked an eyebrow. “Are you Frenchie?”

“Maybe,” the guy said, his bravado making a sudden return. That meant he’d probably be willing to do something stupid.

Sharon was sick to death of him, and she didn’t have the time nor the margin of error for stupidity. She picked up the walkie-talkie, pushed the talk button, and said, “Frenchie’s indisposed.” Frenchie stared at her, wide-eyed, bravado forgotten again. A clamor of alarm arose from the walkie-talkie, two or three voices, at a guess. She changed the channel to static and dropped it on the ground. Then she went to work untying Frenchie’s left hiking boot. 

“What the fuck?”

“I’ll knock you out again,” she said. That was somehow enough to keep him quiet. She tugged the boot off, then the sock. She gave Frenchie a considering look and then leaned over and pinched his nose shut. “What—” he began, and she stuffed the sock in his mouth. He yelled around it. “I could tase you,” she said. He stilled, at least for the moment. That was all she wanted, really.

All the junk in that backpack, and nothing for a gag. Amateurs. She made a chain of zip ties and threaded them through the balled-up sock, still in Frenchie’s mouth. She connected the last zip-tie and then tugged them all taut. He was as gagged as he was going to get, she figured. 

She felt a certain unprofessional satisfaction in the fear in Frenchie’s eyes as she took her revolver by the frame and drew it back. The impact of gun butt on skull was pretty satisfying, too. No point in leaving things to chance.

Sharon put her jacket back on, slid Frenchie’s backpack on over it, and headed back for the cabin. 

It was quiet inside. Sharon clicked on her phone’s flashlight and shone it towards Steve. He was curled towards his tail. He was licking a newborn pup. “Oh my god, Steve,” Sharon whispered. Steve huffed, sounding deeply satisfied. He gave the newborn another lick. “Steve, you did it.” Steve’s tail thumped against the floor.

“I have to go deal with these goons. Are you guys doing okay?”

Steve woofed, ever so softly. His tail wagged again.

“Okay,” Sharon said. She took a deep breath. She couldn’t cry over a baby right now; she had things to do.

She set a trap for the remaining would-be kidnappers a hundred yards back down the path. Her phone had recorded the whole conversation between her and Frenchie, and though its playback effect options were minimal, there was one that did a little vocal distortion: enough to make the words hard to make out, not so much that Frenchie’s buddies would recognize his voice. Or so Sharon hoped. 

She set the recording to play on loop and sat the phone next to a tree trunk, hidden from the path. Then she faded farther into the woods and waited. 

One of the drones came buzzing overhead. She watched it go, again tempted to shoot it out of the sky. Again she held her fire.

Something crashed through the woods, not too far behind her. It was a big burly guy in the same gray fatigues, carrying a rifle. That was worrisome. He followed the sound of the recording right past Sharon’s grove of saplings. Sharon rechecked the settings on the taser gun and shot him in the back. He went down with a muffled cry, flat on his belly. 

Sharon handcuffed him with cuffs from his own backpack, disarmed him, and left him there, moaning from the aftereffects of being mildly electrocuted. Sharon retreated to her grove to wait for the next guy. Two down, at least one more to go.

Burly guy’s walkie-talkie sputtered to life. “Charlie, you copy? I found an old house or something. Pretty rotten, looks like. I’m going to go check it out.”

Sharon sprinted. She rounded the last turn at a dead run, drawing her weapon and aiming it at the man standing just outside the cabin door. He was already starting to turn in her direction. “SHIELD, put your hands up,” she yelled.

He was already reaching for his holster. She got his torso in her sights, just like every round at the firing range, and she shot him. He fell backwards and slumped to the earth. Sharon’s ears were ringing. Her knees felt watery, her grip weak. Adrenaline, shock: not so different from being tased, really. She lowered her revolver and slowly approached the man.

She’d shot him in the shoulder. His eyes were still open as she loomed over him. “How many of you are there?” Sharon said.

The man groaned. “Fuck you,” he mumbled. Sharon put her toe on his bloody shoulder and pressed down, and he groaned louder. 

“You could die of blood loss,” Sharon said. For all her hands were shaking, her voice sounded calm, almost distant, as if it were coming from someone else. “Or you could live, with proper medical attention. How many of you are there?”

“Four,” he groaned. He was younger than the rest, maybe twenty. 

“I’ve got you, Frenchie, and a big guy with a beard. Who’s left?” Sharon pressed a little harder on the kid’s shoulder. She couldn’t have him passing out on her. She needed to know.

“Charlie , he’s our tech guy. He flies the—fuck.” The kid coughed painfully, from fear as much as anything, probably; from the location of the wound, Sharon doubted she’d hit a lung. “The drones. Jams the local wireless. Set off the EMP.”

“Well, you should tell Charlie to unjam the wireless if you don’t want to die from that gunshot wound.” The kid struggled to sit up. He was pale as a sheet, freaked to hell, and probably feeling woozy. Sharon unclipped the walkie-talkie from his belt and held the talk button. “Tell him,” she said.

The kid told Charlie. He was crying now. Charlie squawked some, but the kid started pleading, and that voice on the other side of the static agreed. 

Sharon dropped the walkie-talkie in the dust and walked into the cabin. Steve whined anxiously. “Yeah, we’re okay,” she told him. She slumped on the floor next to him, shaking fiercely now. “We’re all safe now.” She got her phone out of her jacket pocket. Signal appeared before her eyes. Before Sharon could decide who to even call, the phone began to ring. It was Hill.

“Where the fucking fuck are you guys,” Sharon said.

“I could ask you the same,” Hill said on the other end of the line. 

Sharon wasn’t sure she’d ever been so glad to hear another person’s voice. “We’re, um. We’re in an abandoned cabin in the woods by the farmhouse.”

“Thank fucking god. Are you guys okay?”

Sharon looked at Steve, who was listening intently to all of this, and then at—oh god, at _both_ puppies, nursing contentedly at his side. “Yeah, we’re okay. We’re all okay.”

“ _All_?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit,” Hill said, sounding a little shell-shocked. Sharon knew the feeling. “Okay, I’ve got your location locked now. The forest ends about two hundred feet southwest of you. Can you meet us there, or should we send someone to you?”

“Better send someone to us,” Sharon said. “We’ve got three hostiles down. One of them’s been shot. He’ll need medical attention. There’s another one in the area, probably on the run now, so keep an eye out. Maybe send some kind of baby sling, maybe?”

“Will do. Tell Cap congratulations.”

Sharon ended the call. “Hill says congratulations,” she told Steve. His tail thumped against the floor. Sharon stroked his back. “Did all the hard work without me, huh?” Woofing gently, Steve laid his head on his paws. He was safe; the puppies were safe. Sharon petted his ear and waited for help to come.

* * *

Sharon woke up and had a bewildering moment of déjà vu. It was her bedroom in the farmhouse. There were the lace curtains. As she lay there, sore and still exhausted, memories began to seep in: Hill and a squad of private muscle finding the cabin. Sharon carrying the puppies out of the woods in a sling under her jacket while Steve trotted alongside. Riding back to the farm in a quinjet, of which the Avengers had apparently bought several in the SHIELD fire sale.

Now here she was, as if the past two days had never happened. “Jarvis?”

“Yes, Ms. Carter.”

She didn’t even know what she wanted to ask. “Never mind.” Sharon crawled out of bed and realized she was filthy. She’d missed her shower the night before. She’d made sure Steve was comfortable with the puppies and gone straight to bed.

She put on a less-dirty t-shirt and pair of jeans and poked her head out the door. Down the stairs she could hear voices, but not Steve’s. She crept down the hall. Steve’s door was ajar; when she was pushed it open wider, there was Steve, still a wolf and curled around his wolf babies. He opened his eyes and looked at her. Suddenly she felt as though she were intruding. “Just checking on you,” she said, and pulled the door shut again.

It was definitely time for a shower. Also breakfast. 

In the kitchen she found Natasha Romanov and Clint Barton. “You’re back,” Sharon said, bewildered. 

“Got in late last night,” Barton said. “Just in time to miss all the action. You want some pancakes?”

“Uh—”

“They’re heroing pancakes,” he said, pointing his spatula at her. “For special heroing occasions only.” Romanov looked on, slyly amused. Sharon could like them, she decided, if she ever had the opportunity to.

“Hill’s team caught the last guy,” Romanov said.

“This is the one that set off the EMP?”

“That’s him. He’s going to be sorry he did that.”

“Thank god somebody noticed when Jarvis went offline,” Sharon said. On the short flight back the day before, she’d learned the house’s instance of Jarvis communicated with Stark’s main network almost continuously. It was Jarvis’s sudden disappearance that had clued Hill in that something was wrong. 

“Yeah, good thing,” Romanov said darkly. “It almost makes up for Tony letting someone _hack his drone_ so they could find Steve in the first place.” 

Aha. That answered one of those lingering questions Sharon hadn’t quite woken up enough to remember yet.

“It all turned out all right, though,” said a voice Sharon hadn’t heard in almost twenty-four very long hours. She turned, and there was Steve, looking rumpled and exhausted and happy as pie about all of it.

“Steve,” Sharon said. Suddenly she felt shaky all over again. “I’m so fucking glad to see you.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Hell of a thing, right? Good thing these guys brought in a babysitter.” He winked at her.

“Right?” Romanov said. “God.”

Steve hung around the kitchen just long enough to hear about Charlie’s capture while Clint to loaded up a plate for him. Steve was clearly antsy to get back upstairs to the puppies. “You can come see them, though, if you want,” he told Sharon.

“Your _fellow Avengers_ will just stay down here and do dishes, it’s fine,” Clint said, but his sarcasm folded into a smile as he handed Sharon a matching plate. She carefully avoided any pointed looks Romanov might be sending her way as she followed Steve up the stairs.

The puppies were wedged between the pillows at the head of the bed and sleeping peacefully. Steve and Sharon ended up sitting cross-legged a little ways away. “They’re going to be people,” Steve said quietly.

“Yeah, they are.”

“It’s weird, like, I know what babies look like. They don’t usually look like this.” Gentle he stroked a finger down the nearer puppy’s back. It didn’t so much as squirm.

“Werewolves,” Sharon said.

Steve laughed. “You know, I had all these plans. I invited Dave and Ravi to the birth. They had a wet-nurse lined up for the puppies until they opened their eyes and transform. I mean, she’s still lined up, but since the puppies came so early, I have to nurse them for a couple more days before she’s ready. Anyway.” Steve gave her one of those rueful smiles that were so appealing to America and also, she could admit now, to her. “Plans just don’t work out how you think.”

“I hear that.”

Steve laughed. “Yeah, I guess you do.” He followed the curl of the puppy’s tail with his finger. “Sharon,” he said soberly. “Thank you for coming. If anything had happened to them, I—” He broke off, unable to finish the thought. “Thanks for taking care of us.”

Sharon’s throat was tight. “It was an honor.”

“I don’t know what we would have done without you.”

Sharon laughed shakily. “I’d say that’s what a girl likes to hear, but honestly it just makes me nervous. _One_ rookie CIA agent. That was your security.”

“Not CIA. SHIELD, right?”

“What?”

Steve’s smile was fond. “I don’t remember stuff that well from when I’m a wolf, but I remember that. It was when you yelled at that guy to put his hands up. You told him you were with SHIELD.”

“I—don’t remember that at all.” Everything between hearing the kid’s voice over the radio to standing over his bleeding body was a blur. Or maybe it was like a photograph, taken from very far away, difficult to take any detail from. “I miss it, I guess. SHIELD.”

“Your dream job.”

“Yeah,” Sharon said. “So much for that. The agency’s not so bad, though. With Hill’s report on my ‘offsite assignment,’ they might even finally let me in the field pretty soon. Security detail, probably. The most glamorous of all CIA postings.”

“Always on the clock,” Steve said. There was a funny note in his voice.

Sharon wanted to kiss that mouth and its rueful smile. She wanted to give Steve that chance to redeem himself in bed. She wanted to finish showing him _Legally Blonde_. She wanted, in fact, any number of things that she had never thought she could have outside the unreal, otherworldly confines of this farmhouse. 

Carefully, she said, “Not _always_. I do get a night off now and then. Catch something on Netflix.” She met his eyes and added, with deliberate care, “Go out for a coffee.”

Steve licked his lips. “Maybe you’d like some company, sometime.”

“Maybe I would.”

“We could keep in touch.”

“With your pager?”

“Not with my pager,” Steve said, the corners of his mouth turning up. Sharon gave in at last and kissed him. He tasted of maple syrup. He smelled of fresh soap and, underneath, the faint but unmistakable tang of wet dog. It was a combination Sharon could get used to real fast.

She pulled away far sooner than she would have liked. “I should probably pack. I think Romanov’s giving me a lift home here in a bit.”

“Sure,” Steve said. He stroked her shoulder and let her go. “Don’t forget about us, huh?”

With utter sincerity, Sharon said, “I don’t think there’s any danger of that.”

* * *

The Sokovian ruble had dropped on the international market. This was of concern to someone three links up the chain from Sharon, which meant it was now also Sharon’s concern. Her overpriced draft beer hadn’t been enough to distract her from this basic problem of economic consequences for more than ten minutes, which was why she was sitting on barstool on a Friday night scrolling through a report on the Sokovian civil disobedience tradition.

“Is this seat taken?”

Sharon looked up, ready to say it wasn’t and get back to her report, and her breath caught. “Steve,” she breathed, almost unwilling to believe it. “You’re here.”

“Well, I wanted a drink, this place is supposed to be good.” He smiled winningly. “I hear all the off-duty spooks come here.”

Sharon choked a laugh. “It’s all right. Did you just check all the bars in McLean?” She’d last texted Steve yesterday. He had the texting thing down pretty well; she couldn’t decide whether to blame his atrocious spelling on his education, the phone, or sheer laziness. He definitely had never said anything about coming for a visit.

“Maybe just this one.” Steve shrugged, the picture of nonchalance. “I figure, what’s a little illicit surveillance between friends?” 

“Oh my god,” Sharon said. Steve looked intolerably pleased with himself.

The bartender came by, which gave Sharon a chance to look Steve over while he ordered. He looked good. The softness under his jaw a month ago had melted away; the guy she saw before her was much nearer the Steve Rogers every American thought they knew.

He caught her looking and shot her another grin. “Still got some of the baby weight I’m working off,” he said, patting his stomach. With a bolt of ill-timed desire, Sharon realized just how much she wanted to explore that post-baby body. Many times, preferably. She wanted to find all Steve’s remaining soft places and possibly nibble on them.

Interrupting this intriguing line of thought, Steve said, “I think we’re going to keep the farmhouse.” 

“Oh yeah?”

“We’re going to use it as a getaway kind of thing. There’s an automatic sprinkler system hooked up, so that’ll keep the garden going. I’ll still be able to pick the tomatoes.” 

“That sounds really nice,” Sharon said. She’d have said it of pretty much anything if it put that look of quiet delight on Steve’s face.

“It turns out maybe I don’t have to give it up—the garden or, you know. Other things.” Steve gave her a cautious, hopeful smile. “So I thought I’d come and try my luck.”

Sharon slid her hand over his. He was still so warm. Three days of month-old memories came pouring back in. “I think your luck’s about to get pretty good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Sharon said, breaking into a smile. She withdrew her hand, not that it was likely to help. The gossip around the rookie cubicles had been bad enough after her return from her mysterious offsite assignment; it’d be unbearable now that she’d been seen in public, _locally_ with Captain America. Steve was smiling back, bright with hope, so he was no help, either.

“Hey,” he said suddenly. “Dave and Ravi sent me new pictures of the kids today. Do you want to see?”

There was, Sharon discovered, not a thing in the world she wanted more than to see pictures of Steve’s babies. “Show me,” she said.

[end]


End file.
